Dear Parish Faithful,
Holy and Great Monday
"For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified."
(I Cor. 2:2)
Fr. George wrote extensively on the Orthodox understanding of redemption, or how Christ accomplished our salvation through the Cross and Resurrection. He was always engaged in discovering the "mind of the Church" by carefully reading and studying the great Church Fathers. In fact, he attempted to synthesize their thought in a cohesive and convincing manner. A great deal of what her wrote on redemption is helpful for a better appreciation of the culmination of Holy Week in the Cross and Resurrection.
The incarnation of the Word was a revelation of life; Christ is the Word of Life. But the highpoint of the Gospel is the Cross; the death of the incarnated. Life was completely revealed in death. This is the paradoxical mystery of the Christian faith; life through death; life from the grave. We are born to a true eternal life only by our baptism into death and burial in Christ; we are reborn with Christ at the baptismal font. This is the unchanging law of true life: "what you sow is not made alive unless it dies" (I Cor. 15:36).
Redemption is an historic event, as much as it is also an eternal design. It is a sovereign deed of God, but it is also an offer to humanity, and humanity's response in faith belongs to the very structure of the actual redemption. The world has been redeemed, once and forever, but it is still being redeemed, and is to be redeemed. Christ's coming is itself both an accomplishment, a consummation of the promise, and an inauguration of the New Covenant, of the New Humanity, of the "New Creation: " Christ and His Body cannot be separated.
From On the Tree of the Cross - George Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement, p. 144 & 154